From player development to staff pipelines — what genuine investment looks like, and what the game is still missing.
Mirelle van Rijbroek · 2026
Representation as quality
Who is missing — and what it costs
This is not a conversation about whether men can work effectively in the women's game. Many do excellent work. This is a conversation about what is missing — and what that absence costs in terms of the quality of the decisions being made.
In most countries and organisations, the majority of head coaches of women's teams are male. The majority of talent identifiers and scouts in the women's game are male. At technical director and sporting director level, female representation drops further. At governance and executive level, it drops further still.
Perspective shapes decisions. When the people building the frameworks and making the calls do not have lived experience of the female pathway, there are things they will not naturally think to look for. Not because of bad intentions — because of the fundamental limits of what any of us can fully understand without having lived it.
Head coaching
Majority of women's head coaches are male
Talent ID & scouting
Female representation is very low
Technical direction
Drops further at this level
Governance & exec
Near-absent at decision-making level
Sports research
Female athlete data is still very limited
Role models are not optional for young girls. They are essential. A 12-year-old girl who looks around her football environment and sees only men in positions of expertise and authority receives a message — clearly and repeatedly, without anyone needing to say a word — about where she belongs in this sport.
This is a quality argument, not just a fairness argument. Organisations that include women in meaningful roles at every level make better decisions about female players. They build better environments. They catch more of what an all-male room would miss. The investment in getting women into these roles and supporting them to succeed is not charity. It is a performance strategy.
A system that lacks the perspective of the people it serves will always have blind spots it cannot see.
Mirelle van Rijbroek
A reality of the environment
Online abuse in women's football
When women become visible in spaces that have not yet fully accepted them, something predictable tends to happen. After the 2023 Women's World Cup, research documented the scale of abuse directed at female players and staff. The findings were alarming — and the pattern continues.
Targeted harassment, sexualised abuse, racist abuse, and systematic campaigns designed to intimidate women out of visibility. When a female coach is appointed to a senior role, the response on public platforms regularly includes content that is degrading, threatening, and misogynistic. When female players perform poorly in a high-stakes match, the online response is qualitatively different from what male players experience in comparable situations.
This matters for talent identification and development because it is part of the environment that female players, coaches, and leaders must navigate — not sometimes, not in extreme cases, but routinely, as part of what it means to be visible in this game. It shapes who is willing to step forward into visible roles. It shapes what young girls see when they look at the women's game and ask whether there is a place for them in it.
Football culture can change. But it requires intentional and sustained effort from everyone inside the game — clubs, federations, platforms, media, and the individual coaches and leaders who have the power to set the standard for what is acceptable in their own environments. Silence in the face of abuse is not neutral. It is a signal.
What good looks like
Creating environments that set women up to succeed
Intention matters. But intention without design produces inconsistency — and inconsistency in an environment is felt immediately by the people inside it, especially in female teams where relational sensitivity and cultural awareness tend to be high.
High standards with genuine support
The best environments are extraordinarily demanding — and those demands sit inside a culture of genuine belief. Challenge comes from care, not from authority. The player feels the demand is coming from someone who is fully in her corner. These two things are not opposites.
Psychological safety alongside accountability
Psychological safety does not mean no consequences. It means people can be honest about what is working and what is not — without fear that honesty will be used against them. Players can take risks, make mistakes, and fail without it defining their standing.
Feedback that is direct and relational
Vague, overly positive feedback does not help players grow — it undermines trust, because players know when they are not being told the truth. Honest feedback, delivered within a relationship of genuine care, specific enough to act on. That is the standard.
Visible and diverse leadership
Female coaches, technical staff, and leaders who are present and genuinely empowered — not decorative. When female players see women in positions of expertise and authority, the ceiling on what they believe is possible for themselves lifts. And the quality of the environment improves.
Design that reflects female reality
Training load, recovery protocols, physical programming — all designed with female biology in mind. Not borrowed from male templates and assumed to transfer. Scheduling that accounts for the menstrual cycle. Support systems that reflect the full reality of a female athlete's life.
Explicit pathways and development conversations
Players should know where they stand and where they are going. Development conversations should be regular, honest, and forward-looking. Uncertainty about their own development is one of the greatest drains on female player confidence and motivation.
The environment is the message. What you build tells every player and every staff member exactly how much you believe in them.
Mirelle van Rijbroek
Building better pipelines
Pathways for players — and for the people who develop them
You cannot build the next generation of female players without building the next generation of female coaches, scouts, technical directors, and leaders to develop them. These two tasks are inseparable.
When Mirelle was building her career — earning her coaching licences, working as a talent coach, trying to establish herself in spaces not designed for her — there were almost no women in the roles she was working toward. No female talent directors to look to as a reference point. No female scouts to learn from. No established template for the journey she was on. That absence is harder to carry than it sounds. It is not just about inspiration — it is about the quiet, persistent uncertainty that comes from doing something for which there is no established path.
Multiply that by every girl in every football environment around the world who looks up from the training pitch and sees only men in positions of authority, knowledge, and trust. Every girl who learns, consciously or not, that women in this sport are the players — not the coaches, not the scouts, not the technical directors. We lose people this way. We lose their contribution to the game for decades.
What is needed is not simply more women in football. What is needed is more women in football who are genuinely supported to succeed — who have the development pathways, the mentorship, the networks, the real responsibility, and the genuine authority to do the work well. A woman hired for visibility who is not given real power changes nothing except the optics. A woman given real power and real support — who succeeds, who develops, who advances — creates something that multiplies.
What needs to change
Deliberate development pathways for female coaches, scouts and technical staff. Hiring practices that actively seek female candidates as a quality strategy. Mentorship by those already inside the system. Governance structures requiring female representation at decision-making level. Not as a compliance exercise — as a strategic investment in the quality of the game.
What it really means
What genuine investment looks like at every level
Investment is a word that can be made to mean almost anything. A women's team created primarily for reputational purposes. A female coach hired for visibility rather than empowered with real authority. A strategy document with no real resource allocation behind it. Players and staff see through this.
At player level
Pathways that open early. Quality coaching deliberately designed around female development. Physical and psychological support that reflects the reality of being a female athlete. And — crucially — second chances. Reassessment. The willingness to say: we didn't see you clearly the first time, and we want to look again.
At staff level
Deliberate development pathways — not just hiring women into roles, but building the conditions for them to grow, to be mentored, to be given real responsibility, to fail safely and learn from it, and to progress. Not performative inclusion. Genuine professional development.
At club & federation level
Genuine strategic priority. Not the women's game as an obligation or a brand exercise — as a core part of the organisation's identity and ambition. Leaders who are accountable for progress. Resources that match the stated priority.
At governance level
Structural requirements for female representation at decision-making level. Research investment in female athlete development. Regulation that creates floors — and culture that builds beyond them. Compliance without culture change produces compliance, not transformation.
The question to carry forward
Does what you do match what you say you believe? Not what your website says. Not what your mission statement says. What you actually do — with your money, your time, your hiring decisions, your programme design, and your daily behaviour.
The neglected chapter
The transition out of football — a talent strategy
Careers in women's football end earlier and more suddenly than in the men's game. The financial cushion is significantly thinner. The support structures for the identity transition from elite athlete to former player are, in most environments, largely absent.
This matters as a welfare issue. A player who has organised her life, her identity, and her sense of self around football deserves support in navigating what comes next. The sport owes her that.
But it also matters as a talent strategy. Former players are the most natural and most valuable pipeline for the next generation of coaches, scouts, technical directors, and leaders in the women's game. They carry lived knowledge of the female player experience that no amount of education or training can fully replicate. When they leave the game without a pathway into another role within it, we lose them. And with them, we lose a resource that would make the game better.
Building genuine transition support is not charity. It is an investment in the long-term future of women's football. Every player who transitions into a coaching, scouting, or leadership role carries lived knowledge that makes every decision she takes more informed. The development of a sustainable, high-quality women's game requires the knowledge, expertise, and leadership of people who have lived the female football experience.
If we develop the whole player during her career, she is more likely to give herself back to the game when it is over.